Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

Watched 7/18/24 (The Internet)

In the opening scene of Kelly’s Heroes, a WW2-set, pre-Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood vehicle, Clint’s Sergeant First Class Kelly inconspicuously sits in the driver’s seat of a military jeep surrounded by rain-soaked Nazis in a fiery, doom-laden German castle. We immediately realize right before the Germans do that something’s not right here. Shit’s about to go down. But instead of the bloody shootout that would ensue in most Eastwood movies, Kelly’s next move is to hit the gas and knock over a suspecting German officer with subversively slapstick impact. Then, set to a very upbeat, very ‘70s theme song, Kelly and his truck full of American protagonists push through various lines of clueless Nazis to escape the castle. It’s a goofy, strange cold open, but one that is very indicative of Kelly’s Heroes as a whole. It’s certainly not false advertising.

Brian G. Hutton’s war movie debut marries farce, western, ridicule, and adventure to ultimately produce a surprising crossbreed of amusing characters and wily shoot'em'up action. It’s not a script that’s interested in anything terribly ambitious, whether that be character development, story, or general plotting. It’s all relatively straightforward with a small satire angle that is definitely overexaggerated in reviews across the internet. Sure, there’s a certain level of cynicism here, but it’s ultimately in service of letting great faces like that of Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, and Donald Sutherland crack jokes and let bullets fly on their mission to become near-millionaires.

Capably embodying a disillusioned American whose loyalties to Uncle Sam have been tested by bad coworkers (who can’t relate?), Clint Eastwood’s Sergeant Kelly finds himself, after the opening scene, having successfully kidnapped a German higher-up. In a positively juvenile move, he coerces the Nazi via liquor prescription to give up details on what turns out to be a shipment of millions in gold bars. With these riches as the MacGuffin, the table is set. Kelly and his men narrowly escape the outskirts of the German castle and what turns out to be friendly mortar fire crashing down all around them. As hokey as the drinking truth-serum experiment is, there’s plenty of real-war yelling and violence that surrounds it. It’s an equally dumb-funny and very scary scene; and one of the people yelling and shooting is Telly Savalas.

Outside of his time in Bond and Dirty Dozen, I didn’t have much of a relationship to Savalas going into Kelly's Heroes. As such, I was a bit blown away to see how credibly he took on the role of Master Sergeant Big Joe, as he is credited on IMDb. What a name. Big Joe is the perfect precursor to the angry captain that would factor into so many of the buddy cop movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s that Kelly’s Heroes steadily rocked the cradle for. Joe opposes Kelly for so long and with so much passion in the film that, when they finally team up to get the job done, we’re so much more invested than we could have been due in large part to the credibility of their adversarial relationship. Putting someone as intimidating as Telly Savalas opposite Clint Eastwood is one of the film’s best decisions time and time again throughout its duration.

And with that pre-buddy cop movie DNA, there comes a need for the wildcard third-wheel character. Leo in Lethal Weapon 2. Billy in Beverly Hills Cop. You could even go so far as Red in Pineapple Express. And then… there’s the aptly-named Oddball in Kelly’s Heroes. Oddball is the king of kooks, the de-facto whacko, the nutjob to set up all nutjobs. I know for a fact that this archetype was done earlier in American film history (see Rio Bravo for an excellent example), but Oddball feels simultaneously like the modern evolution and blueprint.

Oddball, played by the late Donald Sutherland, is such a burst of psychotic magnetism, and such a great foil for Kelly and Joe, that the movie almost doesn’t feel like it’s playing with a full deck until Oddball shows up. The character bedding women on base, rocking an Army-inappropriate, hippie haircut/beard combo, and continuously being irresponsible with the tanks he commands adds a welcome dose of absurd shock to an otherwise fun but straightforward film. With a dulled voice pitch, an awkward cadence, as well as bizarre theories and plans, Oddball even walked with a music-playing tank so that Kilgore could run in Apocalypse Now with his helicopter attack tunes. Oddball: a surprisingly influential guy!

After the team fully assembles, and everyone has been made aware of the objective, it’s off to get the gold. The movie finds a successful, if unorthodox, balance of dysfunctional family-esque comedy and unflinching gun violence. The comedy hits and the shootouts are quite detailed in their photography, with almost all sprays of machine guns getting their kinetic ricochet answers on the ground or on walls if they don’t hit a body first. And the explosions that take place are the reason to pay attention during the action—in fact they force you to pay attention as they are so large, so practical, and so frequent, you wonder if someone died on set. I, for one, would not be surprised to learn of such a tragedy.

When push comes to shove and Kelly & Co. finally arrive at their destination, clever screenwriting choices pair with top-tier editing to make for a highly entertaining showdown. Planting two soldiers in the local belltower with the task of ringing the bell incessantly to overshadow the noise of the US tanks’ “Detroit Engines” is one of my favorite bits in the last however many war movies I have seen. The subsequent standoff against the tiger tank-commanding German officer is so suspenseful and contains such a ludicrously upbeat conclusion that you can’t help but chuckle at the final satirical statement, even as it threatens to rob the picture of its “war” genre designation. And who knows, perhaps there really was a scenario where Germans and Statesmen briefly set aside their differences to get rich off of stealing beautiful gold.

There’s a different reading of Kelly’s Heroes that cries out for a director and script with better control of tone. Uneven and confused could surely be descriptors applied to the movie if one doesn’t decide to tune into some of its more eccentric wavelengths. But you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s a movie with entertainment on the mind and stars to fill it out; and that’s worth a lot--to me, at least. At the end of the day, it's another good Eastwood picture, this one filling out its 140+ minutes with good laughs, capably-shot action, and a handful of memorable moments overall.

8.25/10